Breaking bad? Playing the fool and constructing the ‘bad researcher’ in entrepreneurship

Abstract

How to deal with grand challenges and the crisis of knowledge production and their implications for entrepreneurial research and practice is a topic of growing interest. In this paper we argue that we need to rethink who is involved in entrepreneurship research and how that research is conducted and communicated. This begins by moving beyond the traditional ostensible objective separation of the ‘researcher’ from the ‘research subject’ to adopt a posthuman and post-qualitative inquiry perspective that questions the dominant position of the human subject and challenges the humanistic belief in the essential, conscious and intentional human as the primary source of agency. As such, it adopts a process ontology, stresses hybridity and difference and encourages experimentation. This requires us to become ‘bad researchers’, undertaking subversive research that goes beyond the oppositions of quantitative/qualitative and foundationalist/non-foundationalist. In this we take the ‘fool’ (jester, trickster) as our guide. Historically associated with inversion, usurping authority and putting down the mighty the fool is a liminal character who has the duty to ask all those questions that no one else dares to ask. The paper concludes with suggestions as to how this may inform a re-newed entrepreneurship for the crisis-laden twenty first century.